During the ongoing Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Jolla has announced the release of Sailfish 3, ” the third generation of its independent mobile operating system, along with new device support for Sony’s Xperia™ XA2, the Gemini PDA, and INOI tablets.”

Planet Computers have published a new update about the status of the Linux support on the Gemini PDA. Among other news, they have announced the opening of two new websites:

- a Support site, which will host the various Linux distros, the partition tool plus official information regarding Gemini support, tutorials, tips and other software downloads:http://support.planetcom.co.uk

as you probably noticed, the forum was offline for the past ~18 hours. This outage was due to a problem on the hosting side, and it has affected other sites on the same server too. We are still waiting for a statement from our hosting provider explaining the reason for the outage, but at least the forum is back online. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused, and thanks for your patience.

EDIT: Unfortunately it seems I spoke too soon: some pages still show an error when they are opened, and they are successfully opened only after 3-4 attempts. According to a post by one of the hosting provider's admin, the problem seems to be caused by recent Google Warnings about malware on some of the sites hosted by them, and by the software they are deploying in order to improve the security.

I can assure you that OESF is malware free: we have registered it on the Google Search Console a year ago, and it currently reports that no malware can be found here. I often check the Security status there to verify that no malware has been installed in the meanwhile.

The situation is anyway getting better, and I hope that soon we won't have any more problems. As before, thanks for your patience.

"As Gemini is now in production, the price of the Gemini perks on Indiegogo will be going up to USD $499 for the WiFi and USD $599 for the 4G+WiFi Gemini perk. Perk prices will be changing on 9th of February 2018. Anybody wishing to contribute to the Gemini campaign at the current perk prices should do so before 9th of February 2018."

Also, now it's the final time to make your keyboard layout selection, so anyone who have not done it yet please hurry up:

Adam Boardman, the owner of the Gemini Keyboard Apps project, is searching for contributors. The Gemini Keyboard Apps project "is focused on improving the linux side user apps so that we can remain within the Linux side all the time." It was started from a post on Indiegogo from Henk van Tijen, who suggested the development of a dedicated Linux suite for the Gemini. Only the apps which meet some specific criteria will be included in the project: it must be possible to activate every function of the app using the keyboard, it must run full screen on the internal screen and should make use of the DPI of the screen. More information can be found here:

- Review the apps listed on the wiki, add pages for ones that don't have pages yet along with links to apps from their favourite other open source platforms detailing the features they particularly like and why we should use that as a base of a new app or to branch and patch that for use on gemini. It will be helpful to link to upstream source code repositories where known.

- Test out the current apps, easier once we have devices but the amd64 (x86-64) builds can be tested on a Debian9 virtualbox.

- Review the translations, and translate for more languages. Both the Calendar and Data apps have translations for a few languages, but they are just google translate output so they'll need to be revised.

- Folk keen on design/UX can review the apps with those kind of thoughts in mind.

- Patches welcome for current apps (coders), bugs can be raised on github (non-coders). The interesting thing about say the calendar app is that as its mostly written in QML+Javascript you can just sudo edit the files after you've installed it to try out smaller fixes.

- Pick an app that is so far not adopted and possibly after some discussion of the best direction to take hack away at it, once you've got something where at least the core functions are working we can add it to the jenkins build system so that more folk can start testing it.

Moreover, the project is now moving to a new Github organisation and changing its name (since gka is not available), please cast your vote on this poll to choose the new project's name: GKA poll thread

To apply as a contributor, please login on the linked Wiki page, reply to the related thread on OESF or send a PM on OESF to Adam.

This fan page gathers all the news regarding the Gemini PDA, with sections covering tips and trick, reviews, app recommendations and surveys. We have partnered with them, and our forum appears as a link on the Gemini Planet's Forums section, together with a link to the #planetgemini channel. Thanks Mike for the links!